Say our name
A couple of comments from fans of that Facebook post about families giving birth:
- I will never understand people who are offended by inclusivity. Saying “birthing individuals” takes nothing away from cis women and adds a lot for trans men. Thank you for being inclusive with your language!
- Why can’t people understand that including everyone isn’t erasing anyone?
So “All Lives Matter” takes nothing away from black people and adds a lot for white people? No. The “All” replacing “Black” is there for the explicit purpose of erasing the “Black” part and the injustice BLM is campaigning against. Woke people understand that without the slightest struggle, don’t they, yet they deny it angrily when the word that’s erased is “women.” It’s not true that it takes nothing away from women to stop naming them when talking about subjects that concern them and indeed are at the core of why they are a subordinated group in the first place.
The struggle to be named, the struggle against being erased, the struggle to be remembered, has always been central to feminism. Women have been and are treated as afterthoughts, second-best, marginal, out of sight, unimportant, insignificant. Not being named is crucial to that treatment, and being named is crucial to ending it. That’s what it fucking takes away from us.
A little thought experiment on erasure. How would TRA’s feel if the article had been phrased ‘women and certain other individuals ‘? Play around with other wordings that refer to trans people in opaque or oblique ways. I’m sure it wouldn’t go down well.
Next up: MeToo becomes MxToo.
Ophelia, we need a t-shirt. You’ve used it twice for column heads now: Say Our Name. T-shirt time.
We can always tell when I recycle a title because a number appears in the url. Heh.
And yes: that would be a good and useful T-shirt.
Maybe I’ll get to work on that. Right now I’m only directing a play, teaching two classes, editing someone’s manuscript, editing my own manuscript, putting out a newsletter, and working on my fall classes. Yeah, looks like large blocks of time in that…
Seriously, I probably will. For some reason, the more I have on my plate, the more I get done.